Sunday, December 6, 2009

It's official... Georgia will take on Texas A&M in the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, La. on Dec. 28.

The bowl held a teleconference tonight, and here's a bit of what head coach Mark Richt and AD Damon Evans had to say...

-- Bowl committee statement: “Our selection committee members are truly excited about the strong ties to the Independence Bowl both universities have and are excited they will once again add to the rich history of the Advocare V100 Independence Bowl. We could not have asked for a better match-up than the Aggies vs. the Bulldogs for the 2009 Bowl game.”

-- Evans on tickets: “I think the allotment is 12,000, and we’ll push tickets as we always do. Being that last game we expect our fans to have some excitement and travel well and we need them to travel well because their support is crucial to our overall success. So we’ll get out there an market this bowl as we do all other bowls and show our excitement.”

-- Richt on handling the matchup without three defensive coaches: “I think challenge is a better word – not to say that we’re not concerned, but we’ll use the word ‘challenge.’ It’ll be a great challenge and a great opportunity for those young guys and for our defensive players to step up to the plate and really do everything they can do to help with the situation we’re in right now. And of course Rodney Garner will be right there working it, too. It’ll definitely be a challenge, no doubt. We’ve seen enough to know they can move the ball, put points on the board and it’ll challenge everybody across the board – offensively and special teams, too.”

-- Richt on whether Garner would be considered the DC for the game: “We’re not going to throw anything out like that. We’re going to work together on this thing and get it done.”

-- Richt on his own involvement in the game: “I’ll be helping out in the organization and planning and I’ll spend probably 99 percent of the time on the defensive field as we prepare. I’ll definitely help facilitate that, and my role might be to make sure the scout team is doing a good job because the guys that were working the scout team are now going to be working with the defensive unit. It’ll be an all-hands-on-deck situation, but I think everybody is going to have a good attitude about it and we’re all going to work together to get prepared.”

-- Richt on whether he could take anything from this year's matchup with fellow Big 12 opponent Oklahoma State as preparation: “Just playing Oklahoma State and being able to see all the teams that Oklahoma State played that are in common, you get some kind of gauge of what we’re up against. But you never know what’s going to happen in any given Saturday or any given bowl game. A lot of teams might be a certain way at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year they’re a whole lot different. A&M really finished extremely strong and that’s going to be a big factor for us. Until we really start studying the film, it’s going to be hard to have a really good gauge of what we’re up against.”

-- Richt on the selection process: “When we were sitting where we were with everybody else sitting there, it was just a big wad of teams. To try to sort it out and try to make a lot of sense of where everybody should go, it was very difficult for everybody. So I had no preconceived ideas of where we might go or where we should go and I was just thankful that we got ourselves in a situation where we could play this bowl game and play on national TV one more time and a chance to coach these seniors one more time.”

-- Richt on moving players like Logan Gray and Richard Samuel to new positions, along with other changes for the bowl game: “We won’t do a lot of that – I doubt we make some position changes just in practice. We’re going to have our hands full just preparing for this game. I’ve always had the opinion that it’s very crucial to try to win the game. A lot of people say it’s more spring ball and that kind of thing, and not to say we won’t have some opportunities for some young guys to scrimmage a little bit, but our main focus is preparing to play this ballgame.”

Couple other tidbits:

-- The last time UGA played in the Independence Bowl, Damon Evans was a wide receiver for the Bulldogs.

-- UGA's first scheduled practice is Saturday. The departure date for Shreveport is still to be determined, but Richt said that there's a good chance they will practice over Christmas rather than their normal mode of operations of giving players off for a few days over the holiday.

Interesting that Coach Richt went out of his way to say that no one (not so secret code for Garner) will named interim DC for the bowl. I sure hope they are aggressively pursuing someone for the position. Seems awfully quiet right now, what do you think Dave, any new names?

Can someone explain how the extra practice is good for the team? None of the redshirts get to play, the same guys, seniors and all, will be the starters and no new defensive schemes to learn. How is this in any way beneficial?

PatinDC,Because practice makes you better. You get to improve at full-speed, something you can't do in the summer. Do you think 2 more weeks of practice really won't help Aaron Murray?

Plus, bowl practices routinely end w/ full speed scrimmages with redshirts and young 3rd teamers, almost a pseudo-spring situation. In case you haven't noticed, our boys don't need to learn new schemes, they need to learn fundamentals. I think our head coach is going to have a blast coaching defense for 3 weeks.

Advertisement

Search Top Blogs...

Subscribe To

My Latest Tweets

Twitter Updates

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seth Emerson has been covering the SEC and Georgia (on and off) since 2002. He worked at the Albany Herald from 2002-05, then spent five years at The State in Columbia, S.C., covering South Carolina. He returned to Athens in August of 2010, only to find that David Pollack and David Greene were no longer playing for the Bulldogs. Adjustments were made. Emerson is originally from Silver Spring, Md., and graduated from Maryland in 1998 with a degree in journalism and a minor in getting lost on the way to practically everywhere. Then he spent four years at The Washington Post, covering small colleges, a couple NCAA basketball tournaments, and on one glorious day, was yelled at by Tony Kornheiser. It was probably at The Post that he also learned to write in the third person.These days he lives in Athens with his beloved and somewhat wimpy dog, Archie. Together they fight crime at night in northeast Georgia, except on nights there is no crime, in which case they sit at home, sip on white wine and watch reruns of "Mad Men."